Location! Location! Location!  That’s the mantra that real estate people use when they assess the value of sites for businesses and homes.

Ironically, the importance of location can even be applied in natural resource management. 

Here is ash from the recent fire on Casper Mountain.  When it’s on or in the soil, this ash can be a beneficial resource.  It contains nutrients that may have been locked up for decades in dead vegetation.  The fire released these nutrients and they can now be used to support new plant growth.  Ash is fertilizer on this location.

Here is another location where ash has accumulated.  After a rain, it washed into this drainage and created a black sludge.  These nutrients are on their way off Casper Mountain and into the North Platte River.  When too many nutrients get into water, they may become harmful pollutants.

Here’s a place where erosion of soil has occurred after the fire, again carrying sediments from where they are supportive of the plant-animal community to a location where they could cause problems to human developments or water quality.  One task of managers after a fire is to keep soil and nutrients from becoming pollutants…valuable resources from becoming a mud slide.

Even in nature, whether something is of immediate value to humans or a natural system or a major problem is largely a matter of location.  I’m Gene Gade from the University of Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service.